Joe Scarborough, co-host of Morning Joe, has pushed back on Republicans who continue to assert that President Donald Trump’s birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein is a “hoax,” reminding them that the initial reporting came from one of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative news organizations.
On Monday, Democrats on the House Ethics Committee released the letter that allegedly contains Trump’s signature and the hand-drawn outline of a naked woman, appearing to confirm a July report fromThe Wall Street Journal.
The White House has maintained its position that the letter is fake and it is not Trump’s real signature. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it a “Democrat Epstein hoax.”
But on his morning show Tuesday, Scarborough pointed out: “It is Rupert Murdoch’s own conservative media empire that is running this, not Democrats, not a Democratic hoax, not a left-wing CBS News edit or whatever they would want to say.”
He added: “This is straight out of the Murdoch empire, all of it.”
Jonathan Lemire, a Morning Joe co-host, said Tuesday that the White House’s denial about the birthday letter is “an attempt to deny reality.”
When asked for comment in response to Scarborough’s remarks, the White House referred to the press secretary’s X post, denying the authenticity of the birthday letter.
“As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it,” Leavitt wrote. “President Trump’s legal team will continue to aggressively pursue litigation.”
Murdoch founded the conservative news empire, News Corp, whose TV stations and newspapers have been largely friendly towards Trump and his administration.
In July, The Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report which claimed that Trump sent Epstein a “bawdy” 50th birthday letter with the outline of a naked woman’s body, in 2003.
Trump denied sending the letter and filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones.
The Trump administration has spent the summer trying to quell public outrage over its refusal to release the full extent of the government’s investigation and documents on Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender accused of sex trafficking young women and girls for years.
While Trump and Epstein were friends in the Nineties, the president says that he stopped talking to the financier in the early 2000s after Epstein “stole” a young girl from his Mar-a-Lago club. However, reports said that Trump formally banned Epstein from his club in 2007.
The president has said that Democrats have created a “hoax” about his relationship with Epstein to attack him politically.
But conservative commentators and some Republican lawmakers, including Trump loyalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, are pushing for the Epstein files’ release.
